Every religion has done it.
Except maybe the Romans who just incorporated every god they came across into their own pantheon. They even had a shrine to the “unknown god” which was an empty niche. The Christians were not originally persecuted specifically because they were Christians, but rather because they refused to bow to any of the Roman deities. I imagine an ardent enough atheist would have gotten the same treatment.
This discussion comes about because of a conversation I had with Star last night. She’d been to a vigil held for “Lightning Medicine Cloud,” the white buffalo calf born on the Lakota Ranch of Sitting Bull’s great-great-great grandson Arby Little Soldier. A non-albino white calf is a rare occurrence, happening only about one in ten million births, and the Sioux hold them as a sacred sign of peace. A celebration in honor of his first birthday was scheduled for next week. Instead it will be a memorial service.
Arby Little Soldier and his family left the ranch in Greenville, Texas for a brief trip to Oklahoma. When they returned, they found the carcass of a skinned calf. It was determined to be that of Lightning Medicine Cloud. There’s no law in Texas against killing a buffalo. Horses are still a hanging offense, but not buffalo. But the people in Greenville have been writing people in authority, Senators, Congressmen, trying to get this classified as a hate crime. Personally, I’m not sure they are wrong. According to articles I’ve read, the details of the slaughter make it clear this was not a random, spur of the moment event.
But, as I said, every religion has been persecuted in this way. It is usually a case of a newcomer (whether by time or conquest) supplanting an established religion.
An early recorded example is in the Bible when the Hebrews were to enter Canaan and other lands. The Canaanites worshiped the fertility Goddess Asherah. They used an object known as an Asherah (sometimes “Asherah pole,” plural asherim) as an idol for their worship. Part of God’s renewed covenant as spoken to Moses in Exodus 34:13-14:
“But rather, you are to tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and cut down their Asherim — for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God –” [New American Standard Bible]
The Christians (specifically the Catholic church, though they are not alone) throughout history have denigrated or destroyed the religion of others in the hopes of saving souls by converting others to the one true living God. In the name of God the Druids had their sacred groves cut down and burnt, the Mayans had their libraries burned (try learning about our culture by reading just what is left written on stone!), the Australian Aborigines had their children stolen and raised in orphanages to change their faith and “civilize” them (this is a Wikipedia link, but it has links to many good sources), the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, the Celts, and so many others were told there was only one way and their way was not it. The internal fights even within the church over tiny matters of doctrine, pointing fingers at others and crying “heresy,” calling for inquisition? I’m a Christian, and I believe, but the history of my church is bloody.
In 1997, a Taliban (radical Islamic sect, not indicative of all Islam) commander declared he was going to blow up the Buddhas in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan “because they are idols.” “In July 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued a decree in favor of the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddha’s statue. Because Afghanistan’s Buddhist population no longer exists, which removed the possibility of the statues being worshiped, he added: ‘The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected.'” However, over the next months, the Taliban became more restrictive, issued an edict against all “idols” or images of the human form, and began destroying all works of art depicting it. In March 2001, while the Afghanistan foreign minister assured the public that the Taliban had no intention of destroying them, they turned their attention to the two Buddhas in the Bamiyan valley and systematically dynamited the 180- and 121-foot-high statues to oblivion. Source
J Michael Straczynski was writer of Babylon 5, a show I loved watching. In one episode, one of the non-humans had sent out a message after his ship had been hit and was about to explode, “The humans kill that which they do not understand.” Unfortunately, that is all too often true.
We need to learn to do better.